Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

A Component-Based Middleware for a Reliable Distributed and Reconfigurable Spacecraft Onboard Computer

Emerging applications for space missions require increasing processing performance from the onboard computers. DLR's project “Onboard Computer - Next Generation” (OBC-NG) develops a distributed, reconfigurable computer architecture to provide increased performance while maintaining the high reliability of classical spacecraft computer architectures. Growing system complexity requires an advanced onboard middleware, handling distributed (realtime) applications and error mitigation by reconfiguration. The OBC-NG middleware follows the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) approach. Using composite components, applications and management tasks can easily be distributed and relocated on the processing nodes of the network. Additionally, reuse of components for future missions is facilitated. This paper presents the flexible middleware architecture, the composite component framework, the middleware services and the model-driven Application Programming Interface (API) design of OBC-NG. Tests are conducted to validate the middleware concept and to investigate the reconfiguration efficiency as well as the reliability of the system. A relevant use case shows the advantages of CBSE for the development of distributed reconfigurable onboard software

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

Engineering methods and tools for cyber–physical automation systems

Much has been published about potential benefits of the adoption of cyber–physical systems (CPSs) in manufacturing industry. However, less has been said about how such automation systems might be effectively configured and supported through their lifecycles and how application modeling, visualization, and reuse of such systems might be best achieved. It is vitally important to be able to incorporate support for engineering best practice while at the same time exploiting the potential that CPS has to offer in an automation systems setting. This paper considers the industrial context for the engineering of CPS. It reviews engineering approaches that have been proposed or adopted to date including Industry 4.0 and provides examples of engineering methods and tools that are currently available. The paper then focuses on the CPS engineering toolset being developed by the Automation Systems Group (ASG) in the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K. and explains via an industrial case study how such a component-based engineering toolset can support an integrated approach to the virtual and physical engineering of automation systems through their lifecycle via a method that enables multiple vendors' equipment to be effectively integrated and provides support for the specification, validation, and use of such systems across the supply chain, e.g., between end users and system integrators

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available